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The Meditation Experience

The Meditation Experience
Volume I

These nature meditations, a series of inner journeys for peace, insight and healing, will open your heart, expand your senses, and awaken your mind to the wellspring of wisdom within you.
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"Something is struggling to be born." These words have echoed through my mind since I heard them last November. What a wonderful way, I thought, to describe the birth of a new age. We can’t see it with our human eyes, but we know by instinct that something is struggling to manifest in human consciousness, to pour forth into this physical world and come to life through the birth canal of the Earthly Mother.

When it does, we will recognize this "something" as the light of a new age of peace and harmony on our planet.

How can this light dawn, we ask, amidst government atrocities, corporate corruption, the rape of Mother Earth, social decay and rising confusion about everything from the U.S. war in Iraq to personal loss and pain?

We know with intuitive certainty that this is exactly when dawn does come to light, in the depths of the darkness in which we now find ourselves.

I wanted to know, as perhaps you have too, how we came to this planetary dark night of the soul. Over thousands of years, why do we still hate and kill one another? What hinders our evolution?

My still, small voice explained, in a beautiful meditative writing, that struggle intensifies as the old gives way to the new, because the old way fears change and its own death. Frightened, it resorts to outworn patterns of doubt, judgment, separation, conflict and war, steadily intensifying the struggle. It forgets that everything, in every moment, is a combination of the old and the new, so it fights transformation.

We are at the height of this struggle in our personal lives and in our governments and institutions, yet we are here because it is time for the old ways to fade and the new to blossom. We are at this juncture because it is time. Sometimes darkness seems all-powerful and we feel hopeless. But in truth, all will come to light if we patiently "hold our seat," as Buddhism says, stay calm and intensify the light in us, that it may ripen the good seeds into an abundant harvest to be shared by everyone.

This optimistic view is not magical thinking, but rather, is the natural law of life, as I discovered in late 1989 while reading a feature story in Quest Magazine, "The Healing Power of Prayer." In this revolutionary article, Larry Dossey, M.D., detailed a series of laboratory experiments performed by an Oregon research group called Spindrift.

Using careful controls, Spindrift had groups of people pray for the growth of rye seeds and found that prayer directed to specific outcomes is not as powerful as open, undirected prayer for the highest good. Amazingly, undirected prayer brought about more growth in damaged seeds than in healthy ones.

Spindrift concluded that prayer stimulates a benevolent force that by its nature gives the greatest amount of healing to those needing it the most.

And so it is today, as we struggle to step into the healing that our world so desperately needs. For even the most skeptical of us, the work of Spindrift and countless other investigators has proved the existence of a power that heals, one that we can count on no matter what occurs in our lives and on our planet. This power is present at all times, if we are open to it, and its works best when we surrender to and believe in its ability to bring about the highest good.

This energetic force requires neither a name nor a religion to do its work. It just is. We don’t have to be perfect, since its best work is done on the damaged and broken. We have only to ask for and receive its help, as we have done for thousands of years by expecting a spiritual age of harmony and peace. This time has come.

Many of us have observed signs foreshadowing this new era, appearing like an auric field pouring out of the birth canal before the baby arrives. It might feel to you like butterflies in your heart or stomach, stirring an impulse moving from the inner to the outer. We experience it in our desire to seek spiritual knowledge and understanding, and today, this impulse is in most people.

It’s in the marriage of science and spirituality: the mutual recognition that these are two sides of the same coin. It’s in the emergence of a new society called the Cultural Creatives: successful people who read not just the average three books per year, but 25 books on personal growth, spirituality, green economy and sustainable (earth-friendly) living. In 2002, we were one-fourth of the U.S. population, some 65 million people. Today we are 70 million strong and growing.

Our energy infuses everything from paradigm-shifting political action and environmental groups to the decisions of multinational corporations to make whole grain cereals and not to decimate virgin forests for paper and lumber. Today, following the trail-blazing footsteps of Shirley MacLaine and other spiritual leaders, Oprah and Dr. Phil talk love and soul growth while Jonathan Edwards convinces a viewing audience of millions that there really is an "other side."

These are quantum leaps in consciousness, aren’t they, and they’re stimulating every aspect of human experience. While office workers discuss reincarnation in conversations over coffee, their new open-mindedness invites spiritual cinema, a new genre in film-making, to further awaken the masses. "Indigo" will help us honor our gifted psychic children even as the quantum physicists in "What the Bleep Do We Know!?" explain how we create every aspect of our reality.

These are exciting times indeed. While attending Book Expo America in 2002, I was amazed to learn that so many spiritual books are being written now that publishers have declared a literary shift from the Age of Intellect to the Age of Soul.

In this context of open inquiry, it’s no accident that the Essene Gospel of Peace, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts, resurrected from the sands of time, are debunking the angry, vengeful god outpictured and contrived by fear-based religions. Now we are learning the ancient mystical truths of the Earthly Mother and Heavenly Father of which we are an inseparable part.

Science and spirituality, working hand in hand, are guiding us back to the eternal truths in esoteric teachings of the past: that we can create heaven or hell on earth, and we don’t have to die to do it. Now that we are able to see more clearly, these seeds of truth, come to light, are being harvested worldwide.

So it’s no longer a question of whether we are going to move into a new age; we are already doing so, in the auric vapors of the coming baby’s birth. The question is: what will we make of it?

That is up to each of us, as we co-create the new reality. Empowerment teachers, spiritual leaders and the new docu-drama, "What the Bleep," urge us to live intentionally, to release old patterns and define fresh, vibrant ideals like peace, joy, oneness and healing to guide our everyday lives.

In living meditative lives and making life-affirming choices (like eating green and organic, signing petitions, buying hybrid cars and saving Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), we find that everything carries us into healing and growth, the essential nature of the benevolent force stimulated by the prayers of Spindrift and residing in each of us, as we are coming to know so well.

This force is working intensely for us today and its handiwork is seen even in the magnetic pole shift taking place on our planet, according to scientists on a recent Nova program on PBS. Whether the cause is global warming or the end of one cycle and the beginning of another, the Earth’s magnetic field is steadily decreasing in strength and her resonant frequencies are rising.

The magnificent result is our ability to tune in to our inner wisdom and that of the quantum field, according to 30 years of remote viewing research (see 1world.org). The pole shift is amplifying our psychic receptivity to supply us with the comfort and guidance needed to remain loving and courageous during this transition into higher consciousness.

This natural phenomenon will also amplify the calming energies sent out by us during meditation. Proof of this lies in hundreds of studies, but was startlingly visible when Hurricane Jean circled in the Atlantic Ocean for three days while the Dalai Lama was in Miami. The hurricane struck with terrible force after the Dalai Lama’s departure. What if he had stayed, and what would have happened if thousands of Floridians had meditated to calm and dissipate the storm?

What, we might also ask, is the relationship between who we are and the activities of our Earth? I asked my still, small voice about this in meditation and the reply, as usual, was insightful and precise: "See how these are inseparablethe lives and dreams of each soul and the soul of the Mother, for it is one soul, one heart, which lives in the heart and soul of All That Is."

Disturbances in one echo outward to create disturbances in another. My soul voice illustrated with an image of a child twirling a spinning top: The inner balance of the child determines the toy’s wobble or smooth rotation. If the spin of the top is unstable, these emanations of instability and discord will affect the air itself and disturb All That Is.

Conversely, our inner stillness and kind, loving care of the Earth stills the chaotic winds and waters of her birth pangs and allows us all to take our rightful places as stars and planets smoothly orbiting toward the Father’s call to be all that we can be.

It's very likely that we will experience more turbulence as the Mother gives birth and also great loss of life, as with the Indian Ocean tsunami. If this is the case, sorrow will open our hearts to loving compassion and a collective memory: that we were made for these times, have come back to help our planet through them, and have access in our pure, perfect souls to all the love and light needed to do this work.

Our spirits are rising to meet this quickening of the old into the new, with love and joy for what comes. Can you feel this, sense it, taste it?

It is the personality, the lower self, which weeps over the loss of human life and fears the change that is now underway. When sorrow overcomes us, we can heal and serve the world by working to "spiritualize" the personality, as Edgar Cayce put it: by uplifting our perspectives into the Greater Whole; not to become insensitive to others but to ease suffering and extend spiritual compassion by reaching out with hands of help and hope.

No matter what challenges lie ahead, compassionate beings will link with others led by the heart and uplift this new age into what it is meant to be: love becoming the Greater Love in the return of self to Soul right here on Earth. One heart will reach out to another in love and compassion. Hearts newly freed of pain will see the truth of every heartthe light in love, the pervasiveness of this light, how it heals all pain and nothing else matters.

From this expanded viewpoint, we can see how right it is that the Earthly Mother inexorably moves into her labor and delivery, stirring within and around us a spiritual Age of Soul.

It is an age of inner guidance and emergence out of externalized authority and the confusions of our parents, priests and politicians. We can now, as never before, place our destinies in the hands of our wise, kindly souls, and in doing so walk between the worlds of polarity into a peaceful age of harmony and oneness.

With the Earthly Mother’s helping hands we will birth this new age in ourselves. May we do so without struggle, in the calm quiet of the meditative mind awakening us to who we really are: souls working in co-creation with the loving, healing Light within us and all things.

There's a wonderful story about Milarepa, the Tibetan Buddhist saint who as a young man went out into the world to experience life and returned home to find his house filled with demons. He was angry and afraid at first and wanted to fight them or flee. Instead, he did the unexpected.

First he took a deep breath and bowed. Half of the demons disappeared. Then he opened his heart and mind, expanded his field of awareness and out of his mouth came a song that sent away all but one of the demons. The last demon, snarling fiercely, opened his mouth to consume Milarepa, but Milarepa placed his head in the demon's mouth. The demon disappeared.

What's wonderful about this story is the way Milarepa dispelled the demons. He "inspired" himself with a deep, calming breath and expanded into the higher perspectives of peaceful non-resistance.

We can do the same. If we are quiet and wait patiently, magnificent insights will come to us too. We have only to expand our view, as ancient people did in watching the constellations move around the nighttime sky. One day, someone built a wheel and civilization moved forward.

How do we move into the higher mind, which sees farther and more truly than our ordinary eyes?

Here’s how it works for me. When I take a deep breath, widen my awareness and wait patiently, my still, small voice beckons me into the peaceful serenity of my heart. I am drawn by these joyful feelings into a luminous field of love behind my closed eyes, and I sit silently, gratefully, in these currents of energy until Earth meets Heaven in me.

In this stillness of being, I seek not to know why there was an earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean. I open my heart and envision light illuminating that part of the world, calming and purifying earth, sea and sky. In being a channel of blessings, I too am healed.

Some people consider meditative prayer to be wishful thinking, yet it is the single most effective way to bring about healing and peace. More than anything else, the love and light flowing from us will bring each suffering person the understanding, peace and healing so badly needed and propel us all into the age of enlightenment wheeling toward us now.

The amazing research of Dr. Masaru Emoto on water crystals (hado.net) perfectly illustrates the ability of loving prayer to transmute diseased water into molecular patterns of exquisite beauty and harmony. Meditation has the same alchemical effect, according to 600 studies cited by physicist John Hegelin (permanentpeace.org). These studies show that the peaceful energies pulsing outward during meditation build a global brain wave coherence that reduces aggression and heals the quantum field of consciousness.

So why are our lessons still so painful? My still, small voice explains that pain, suffering and loss are in no way part of the natural order. Rather, our resistance to the love flowing through all things creates an energetic snarl of pain and loss.

Today, the tsunami is teaching us how to release our resistance. As we open our hearts and minds to the victims of this disaster, our empathy moves us into the quantum field of love, where we become one humanity.

This is the path of oneness taken by all the great mystics and why the Hindu swami Muktananda said, "Earth, moon, stars and sun revolve inside me." Rumi, the Sufi poet of Islam, urged us to immerse ourselves in the glittering cosmic sea of spirit until our toes begin to say Allah.

The Hebrew prophet Elijah found oneness and divine guidance in the still, small voice within and so did the Christian prophet Jesus. In "The Life of St. Issa," an ancient manuscript translated by a traveler in a Tibetan monastery in the 1880s, Jesus points us to the voice of the heart and God’s infinite healing and peace.

The universal laws of love will protect us if we live in harmony with our planet and keep our eyes on the big picture: a wheel inside a wheel turning us inward to an enlightened new age where we are one people, one mind, one soul dispelling its demons and coming to know Itself.

Wouldn’t it be nice to learn a lesson once and be done with it? Alas, lessons in love come back again and again and typically in struggles with several different people until we "get" what’s going on.

So it’s been for me in learning to honor my feelings, voice my needs and not run from pain and conflict. If you tend to do these things or are experiencing relationship struggles of another kind, maybe this article will help you resist the pill that makes us smaller and sends us down the rabbit hole to a less-than-wonderful Wonderland.

I would be there still, but for the beautiful, profound guidance of my soul, which kindly would not let me off the hook that pulled me out.

I’ll take you down by levels so you can see if these places are familiar.

Level 1: I, Hero

Mark Twain said that, "A lie will travel around the world before the truth gets its shoes on." That also goes for the whopper we tell ourselves: "I am the hero of this story, the victim of the bad guy, and can’t possibly do anything wrong."

I was sure this was my starring role when, a few years ago, I moved to Pennsylvania and lost a close personal relationship that meant the world to me. The laughter, camaraderie and mutual discovery which had given us both such joy over nearly 50 years was suddenly gone, and my mounting pain and loneliness were complicated by the fact that my sense of identity was wrapped up in this relationship.

I found myself without bearings in my new life, but I followed my soul’s sensible suggestion: to define what was missing in my life, realize that it was missing inside of me, create it in myself and project it outward to external reality, which would attract to me what I wanted.

I worked on laughter, friends and music first by picking up my long-neglected guitar, writing some new songs and spending the last half of 2004 busily staging musical events that put me in touch with musicians who became friends. With this came laughter and joy, just as the writing had said.

But then I traveled home to visit my loved one and he was a million miles away. He would neither admit nor discuss the distance between us and ignored, rejected and spoke ill of me to others. I was very hurt and felt hard-done-by. So, back in Pennsylvania, I turned to a meditative writing and asked for insight. It came, as usual, in universal principles like this one:

"Each soul seeks its own way and becomes what it intends to be, whether a savior or a defender of the unholy and wretched. What can be given by each depends on the development of the soul and this in turn comes from its willingness to give or not."

I figured this also applied to President Bush and said it’s not my job to manage anyone else’s soul growth. I was further reminded that soul unfoldment must be determined by the soul and not by outer circumstances or attachments, even when that includes my wants and needs!

My still, small voice advised me not to seek a remedy, but to seek the companionship that would do the mending through love. "Let love be the bridge," I was advised, as the song says.

Level 2: Down the Rabbit Hole, Curiouser and Curiouser

This guidance was sufficient for awhile, especially since my loved one did call me back one time. I felt encouraged. I had lots of love to give and would just keep on loving him. But that resolve did not work. Frustrated by a never-ending project wherein I and the other parties spoke different languages (a symbol if ever there was one), my meditative calm broke and my fuse shortened.

"Where does he get off rejecting me!" I thought indignantly. My lower self griped so much that I let it get into the driver’s seat. This was not a good move. My kitchen TV was broken at the time, so every time I went downstairs to have lunch, I was subjected to an inner dialogue of moaning and complaining and in this mental chaos lost my physical balance.

I banged myself up for a few days, just walking from one room to another. So clearly off-balance, I did what never fails me: I went back to my meditation room to get a grip.

During a deep meditation one morning, I had a vision of a hand being crushed in a grinder and heard a high-pitched squeal of pain. Puzzled by this, I picked up pen and paper and a meditative writing explained that it was my own hand and heart crushed by the hurtful words of my dear one. I was advised to release the hurtful words and be set free.

Stubbornly clinging to my role as Hero (in my own mind), I bombarded my soul with a series of questions, as only a bulldog reporter can do. How do I release these words of derision and why did they come? Could the relationship be repaired? Would it be?

The answer: "See the heart whirling in a bed of light, turning itself into its highest being, gyrating toward the Love which it is meant to be. For each heart, this is a different direction. Some will walk together to the journey’s end, while others will part. Some will part in sorrow, others in anger. The anger can be created to protect oneself from pain. So it is with thy loved one."

Shall I stay away from him, in word and in person, I asked?

"What will create joy in thee both?" came the response. "To hold contempt and pain or to seek reconciliation?"

I answered promptly: "Reconciliation always, and love."

"Let this be, then, and know that each heart opens and closes according to what is in mind and heart and soul. Love gently and with patience and this will be seen. Attend to self and self’s needs, and know self’s deeper Love at all times, for guidance and love."

Level 3: Splash Down, into the Gulf of Separation

But why was I rejected and abandoned by my loved one? (I couldn’t help myself. I had to know.)

"Beloved, see how this (rejection) comes about," my soul responded kindly. "The heart, wounded by an event, closes up and the mind takes control. The mind, given reason to control to protect the heart, criticizes and finds reason to separate from the event and its person. The separation widens and the gulf also, until the heart cannot remember its love and the mind will not let it."

To close this Gulf of Separation, said my soul, "move toward self’s strength, certainty and the knowledge of what needs to be done for love’s sake. Reach into self for the Greater Love and let others be thy solacethe work done for others, the greatness accomplished, the hopes and dreams for self and family. Remember only these and send love, that love may do the work."

It sounded easy and I was given an image to help integrate this: "See love taking wing, in joy and trust in the Light which gives it life. See the dove of Spirit, flying forth to create a new world for self and others. So will it be done for one and all."

In my fragmented state, I forgot this guidance, yet in serving others stayed busy and, sure enough, the pain of separation did begin to lift. But then, a crueler war started raging. The next thing I knew, the Greater Love infused light into another relationship whose sublimated problems jogged loose and bobbed to the surface of my mind!

"But there’s an endless stream of these," I protested, despite knowing that this is the work to be done by us all: to resolve and release what is out of balance inside of us.

I was not so eager to deal with Relationship 2, as I was on top in this one! I knew there wasn’t such a thing, but was successfully distancing myself from this loved one, who just didn’t know how to behave himself! Every time I made a snide comment, he jumped down my throat! The nerve!

What I didn’t know and wouldn’t for awhile, was that somehow, out of some secret closet in the defensive ego, we project our angst outward in an attempt to resolve a situation by turning the tables. I was now the perpetrator, in distancing myself from Relationship 2 in the exact same way that Relationship 1 had distanced himself from me!

Sheesh. How low do we go?

Level 4: I, Perp

It’s no fun to be the victim/hero and even less to be the perpetrator. Now my big work project ground to a sickening halt and my food allergies exploded into serious illness. Of course I didn’t connect any of this, despite being gently reminded by my soul that everything is connected and illness cannot exist in the clear, quiet mind.

By this time, I was rarely meditating, as I’d begun to feel that my soul was on the side of Relationship 2 in telling me to love, love, love. Yak, yak, yak.

Still, I appreciated the images in the meditative writings that I did do: "See how a piece of rope strengthens itself by coiling around, strand upon strand, holding close and binding one strand to another until all is one. So might this be done in relationship, by first bringing peace each to one another and then by requesting mutual accord."

I would have preferred to hang my loved one with that rope! By now I was crawling cold and wet through the Gulf of Separation and was a lit-tle tired of my rabbit hole.

I can laugh at myself now, yet could not find my way out at the time. I was still a hero in my own mind. The saving grace was in my occasional meditations, the counsel in my writings and my quiet pleas for help, which brought healing currents of light to warm my cold, cold heart.

Buoyed by the spirit of the holidays, I called to wish Relationship 1 a Merry Christmas and we talked on the phone for three glorious hours and all was well again. I understood that I was still loved and this was all I’d needed.

Then Relationship 2 went out of town for a week and I spent long hours in powerful meditations that created more love and peace in me and, in this, animated my intuition, waking visions and dream life.

I spent several mornings doing meditative writings on a vision of a dove wrapped in string and rolling downhill (a no-brainer there) and on a series of complex and beautiful technicolor dreams. Every dream was a Shakespearean play depicting my deepest wants, needs and feelings. My soul urged me to take heed of these and voice them, even if I didn’t believe it would help to do so.

It would definitely not help to leave my relationship, said my soul of my urge to jump ship. No, my lesson was to learn to break old patterns of behavior and love fully. Once everything was resolved, I could freely choose whether to leave or not.

"When the heart is closed toward one person," I was counseled, "it cannot be fully open to any other or even to oneself."

I knew that my heart was not as open as it could be, so I decided to release what was plaguing me: Swallow the little frogs first, I thought.

I let go of my halting, six-month work project and affirmed its blossoming. Next, I did a series of heart-mind dialogues and discovered, through meditative dream writing, the extent of my upset about a number of unresolved issues in my relationship. The next thing I knew, my wants, needs and feelings had a real-life stage in counseling sessions with Relationship 2.

The Red Queen, Up and Out

Embarrassingly, I raged my wants, needs and feelings in the first two sessions and just did not look good. But afterward, once I ran out of gas, I could feel the walls around my heart crumbling and letting love back in. The Gulf of Separation disappeared and a shaft of light revealed the stairway leading out of the rabbit hole. I gave myself a little shake and started climbing.

The climb would have been slower, probably, except that one morning I woke up sobbing over the events of a dream in which I felt all the hurt that I have ever caused anyone. I was very sad and sorry, and Relationship 2 lovingly comforted me. This brought us back together again.

I also saw in this dream how intensely leaving my childhood home had affected me. I have read that this is among the worst stressors in life, akin only to the death of a close family member. Indeed, leaving one’s childhood home involves dying to what we have been.

I, the crazed Red Queen of hearts, had attempted to deal with my pain, but had not fully processed the loss and loneliness of leaving home. I had worsened it by burying personal needs that I didn’t feel could be met. Stressed by my growing loneliness, I resorted to old patterns of escapism and endangered one of the most important relationships in my life.

Have you ever done this, too, by falling into your own rabbit hole and Gulf of Separation?

The funny thing about it is that I could have got what I wanted all along, if I had only asked for it. There are still issues in Relationship 2, but I see now that a few more counseling sessions will get these resolved. Sometimes we need an experienced professional to guide us all the way home.

I also see that my troubles came from entrapment in what Buddhist philosophy calls the cycle of attraction-aversion. If I had only kept loving, as my writings consistently counseled, love would have closed the distance in Relationship 2 as surely as my loving did in Relationship 1. It was only my escapist tendencies and growing aversion that got in the way.

Walking on Sunshine

With my heart back in the driver’s seat, I’ve been able to set aside my separation, judgment and blame and, sure enough, as I’ve changed my ways, so has my loved one changed his. The silly truth is that I don’t care so much about our differences now, because I’m so busy enjoying all that we have in common. We are both kinder to each other, and with my heart fully open, I am happier and feel a joyful zest for life that was gone for too long. I can feel the healing currents of light flowing stronger in my body and these are pouring out as laughter, love, creativity and music. Just what I was missing to begin with.

So, having taken the love-pill that makes me bigger, I have popped out of the rabbit hole and am walking on sunshine. Like the Fool in the tarot deck, I toss my trick bag back on my shoulder and continue my journey a bit mussed but as forgiving of my own foibles as I want to be of everyone else’s.

Good luck with your own adventures in love. You are most welcome to share yours in this e-newsletter. May we travel together, meeting our soul destinies sooner because we have not had to travel alone.

P.S. My six-month project blossomed into this website and three others, and the light shining into darkness cured my food allergies and gave me an exciting new world of music. Even in the rabbit hole, everything was working for my good.

I traveled with a busload of Unity folks to see "What the Bleep Do We Know!?" last August and was delighted with this unique film, which weaves a storyline through scientific interviews and funny animated episodes to dramatize how we create our own reality. There’s a lot more to it, but you’ll want to see for yourself.

In late November, I attended a "Physics of Consciousness" conference at the Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach and, one evening, had the pleasure of attending an intimate party with the speakers, most of them physicists. This was just after the presidential race and some who had campaigned for John Kerry were openly discouraged by the outcome of the election.

Curious to see how these enlightened speakers would handle what seemed like defeat, I asked Fred Alan Wolfe, a California-based author and physicist, what would be his next best step. You will remember him from "What the Bleep." He’s the physicist with the wild hair and wide eyes who resembles a highly animated, enthusiastic Einstein. He must be an immensely popular university teacher.

I was delighted with his answer, which precisely parallels my own philosophy and possibly yours too. "A few days from now, I’m going to give a talk to a roomful of Fortune 500 businessmen," he replied, his windmilling hands now perfectly still. "I plan to do what I always try to do: awaken people to who they are and can be."

"What the Bleep" accomplishes this too. The movie started out on the West Coast early in 2004 and was seen and loved by my soul sister, Rebecca Skeele (makeitheaven.com), a nationally known spiritual teacher, author and personal coach based in Santa Fe. She suggested that we dialogue about the film. This is the result.

J: What do you think is the ultimate value of the movie?

R: Well, I’m going to talk about the movie from the perspective of someone who has worked in consciousness for the last 15 years. I’m not a scientist, but I have a degree in Spiritual Science and have worked in the area of human consciousness and divine consciousness and have helped people change their lives.

I think, first of all, that the movie beautifully dramatizes the emotional, addictive behaviors that keep occurring over and over in our lives and why they keep occurring over and over. The other thing it showed beautifully was the value of being able to step outside ourselves and get in touch with what is going on outside of the reality that we think is going on. It’s like the shaman on the shore who sees the ships. No one else can see them or knows they are there. So I think that those two points were wonderfully illustrated. How about for you?

J: That idea about perception was exciting to me, too, because this was the first message in my meditative writings back in 1987 and the notion that actually kept me listening to my inner voice, even though I didn’t know what it was or where it came from. The message was, "We cannot perceive more than we are." I gave this some thought and realized that, well yes, of course we can’t grasp more than we are able to comprehend by virtue of our knowledge, experiences, openness and receptivity to something new.

But that wasn’t all. By extension, this message also said that everyone has a different perspective on reality and thus a different truth. I had always thought that everyone sees any given event the same way, and once I realize that this was not the case, I could see why there’s so much conflict in the worldbecause no two people see things through the same eyes.

R: Yes, and the universe is based on so many variables that until we begin to tap into them we don’t know what truth is and struggle to grasp it, anyway, since truth is constantly expanding.

Another thing that struck me came near the end of the movie, when one of the scientists or philosophers said that at the root of all beingbecause we’re all particles, molecules and waveswe are all one, which means that our thoughts and what we put out affect everything around us.

The idea is for us to change the world by changing our reactions and opening our consciousness to something else that’s there. The movie really nails down what I’ve found to be truethat we’re really addicted to the emotional patterns inside of us and to the way we perceive the world. The world is the way it is because we uphold our patterns and perceptions with our thoughts, stories and feelings. So if we begin to tell ourselves a different story and unhook from our emotional, addictive reactions, our world and our perception of it will change.

J: Yes, that’s the beauty of this whole issue of perception, and it’s why my meditative writings started out by clearing my confusion about our differing perceptions of reality. AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) has an expression: that you talk the talk until you can walk the walk. This is what I did every step of the way in my own journey, as do we all. If we are just willing to stay open and receptive, our perceptions expand beyond the limits of our conditioning.

R: Exactly. We’re more than our conditioning, more than our limiting beliefs, more than our fears, thoughts and feelings and more than our sensations. And what is that "more"? To me, what the movie alluded to and didn’t get into fully, was the "more" of who we are. In other words, it stepped into talking about God, and at one point, the channeler in the movie (J.Z. Knight) said, "Welcome to the kingdom of heaven."

They started talking about what there is beyond this ordinary reality. But what we’ve perceived about that name, G-o-d, has been so limited up until now. To me, the movie was saying that we don’t begin to perceive G-o-d even close to what It really is. We want to deify it, we want to limit it to our own understanding. We want to make it some kind of punitive, right/wrong-thinking God, like we are. But that’s not even close to what this energy is.

Because this consciousness is very impersonal. It’s completely outside of that, and it has to do with the energy that we put out. In other words, if we put out the kinds of thought, feeling and heart processes of peace, joy, love, gratitude, forgiveness, abundance and prosperity, then that’s what will be brought back to us. But if, on the other hand, we put out fear, limitation, worry and threat, that’s what’s going to be brought back to us.

J: Yes. The movie shows, through microscopic physics, that what we think and believe is what we create and that the purpose of being here is to become scientists of our lives so that we can develop our gifts of intentionality and become creators of goodness, peace, prosperity and whatever else we gauge as our ideals.

But I hear what you’re saying. I traveled to the movie with a busload of people from my Unity church and on the way back, several people were disappointed with the focus on science and not on God. I see that as an opportunity for a sequel. I’m pleased that the movie speaks on the level of science right now, because so many people are still angry at the conventional God, but will look at the scientific foundation of concepts like these: that what’s happening within us will create what’s outside of us, that what the brain sees and imagines are exactly the same.

As a matter of fact, I have to admit that every now and then, I get lazy about intentionality and, like most people, tend to "smear positive thinking over a world of negative thinking," as the movie puts it. The day after I saw "What the Bleep," I felt moved to write three powerful affirmations and posted them above my desk, on my bathroom mirror and in my meditation room, where I see them often. I speak or silently voice the words of these affirmations daily, most effectively, I think, after meditation, and always with a heartfelt belief in their truth. Since then, I’ve seen some significant reality shifts, some very positive improvements in my health, work and prosperity.

People don’t have to believe in God to work these concepts, so they’re able to bypass religious obstacles and simply use the science. Our success with intentionality helps us climb the ladder from the bottom two rungs, "life is happening to me" and "my life is being created by me," on up to the top two rungs: "God is working through me" and "God is working in the world as me."

Early on, we become aware of multiple realities and the presence of a benevolent and loving force in the universe. Once this occurs, we don’t need a movie or its sequel to convince us of the existence of God. Once we see the divine in action, our gratitude and surrender to All That Is intensifies this powerful force in us and we’re on our way home.

So the movie, I think, went as far as it could, and I’m thrilled that it went that far.

R: Absolutely. People always say how can God be good if there is so much bad in the world and this movie helps us realize that the bad things are the result of the thoughts we’re creating. As long as people are hooked into fear and ideas of "I’m right and you’re wrong," and "You’re less than and I’m superior," we’re going to create on this planet situations where there’s evil and suffering.

Our world will change for the better when we begin to move out of that polarized thinking and don’t engage in it on a practical, day-to-day level. Situations like "I’m not going to get mad at my neighbor because their dog tips over the garbage and gets trash all over the yard, so I’m not going to send bad thoughts to my neighbor." And "I’m not going to damn the person whose car pulls out in front of me." "I’m not going to gossip in the workplace. I’m going to disconnect myself from that because I want to do something different."

I’ve used three practical, everyday situations that people can relate to, because that’s really the level on which all of us have to begin our spiritual science. We have to get to that level and say, "Well, wait a minute. Let me clean up my world first before I try to clean up the big world. Let me make sure that in my world I send love, withhold that angry comment, observe and witness myself so that I put out good energy."

J: Yes, you remind me that I knew this even as a small child. I was aware that being angry at someone else was actually hurting me. I could feel it. Couldn’t you?

R: Oh, absolutely. It does hurt us.

J: So yes, if we want peace in the world, it must begin with us. I loved that the movie interviewed physicist John Hegelin, because I admire him so greatly as a peacemaker. He has a site online (permanentpeace.org) about the Maharishi Effect and shows scientifically how prayer and meditation decrease surrounding crimes rates by half, and how we have, in meditation, a "Star Wars" defense system that doesn’t cost anything.

I was also happy to see Dr. Masura Emoto’s water molecules in the movie. His pictures are just so spectacular, so visually beautifully, and they prove so perfectly what we’re saying here.

R: Yes. When the movie came to Santa Fe, everybody and his son was talking about it and then we had Emoto come to town. At the beginning of his talk, he spoke about sound and sound particles, then showed us a film clip of a water molecule expanding while Beethoven’s 5th Symphony played. As you watch that molecule expand, you realize that, "What is water? Liquid light," and "What are we? Water and liquid light," and you are seeing that expanded state that we feel when we get in touch with whatever you want to call it: the Holy Spirit, the Christ Consciousness, the Buddha nature.

It doesn’t matter to me what name you put on it. It’s that expansion in which we actually feel bigger, connected to All That Is, being at-one with All That Is. Emoto demonstrated it in the movie, and it was so exciting to me to watch that. That’s what I went away with.

J: And of course, as you say, that’s the expansiveness we feel during meditation when we go beyond the boundaries of the self’s ego and the idea that just because we’re in physical form, we are separate, or just because someone has skin of a different color, we’re different. Then we realize, like the movie and Emoto are saying, that the deepest truth is the fundamental level of our unity, that on the molecular level it’s all empty space and light, and potentiality in this empty space, beautiful and harmonious, balanced and flowing with the divine.

This makes me think of a quote by that wonderful chiropractor in the movie who said, "The more I create my day, the more I am aware of a neuro-net and can do it the next day."

R: We actually create the web in our brains when we begin to practice certain mastery skills. One of the skills that was demonstrated and alluded to in the movie was the observer, especially toward the end. The observer was standing there, noting the choices the woman could make, and the question was, "Have you ever seen yourself as someone you have become?"

To me, what they were alluding to, and we know this from being meditators, is that we develop a witness, a part of us that can step out of usnot in dissociationbut in stepping out of ourselves into the consciousness of the observer and its compassion. What that ability does is create an interrupt in our brain patterning. In every part we interrupt we lay down a new neuro-net and create the new wiring. We actually rewire the reactions inside of us and that’s what gives us the ability to then not-react. To become compassionate and to withhold an angry comment, and to send love instead of anger, to say I understand that we’re different and we see things differently, and God bless you, or whatever, instead of one of us having to be right and one of us wrong.

But that takes practice. And hopefully, people will wake up out of this New Age idea that burning our incense and reading Tarot alone will make a real impact.

J: To me that’s good for attunement, but what attunement is about is awareness and that, as the movie is saying, is about becoming scientists of our lives.

R: Yes, awareness is an ongoing revelation. It’s an ongoing growth process and a rewarding one when we wake up to that and say, "Oh, wow, look at the goody." It’s not like, "Oh God, I’ve got to go practice," like I had to do when I was a little girl and had to practice my piano. There’s a payoff to it, because immediately we begin to receive the gift that comes from that lightness of being, the unburdening that we feel, the feeling that things have lifted and cleared. Our consciousness all of a sudden becomes clear of things like guilt, worry and doubt. We know how to work with those things, and we’re not overwhelmed.

J: Yes. That’s the path of the master, isn’t it? The beauty of the journey is its being an adventure in consciousness, an exciting journey. And I think that was the ultimate message in this movie. Not only are we able to create our own reality and change our hard-wiring in the processand therefore heal our bodies as well, since the mind literally creates the bodybut we are also creating a higher-frequency neuro-net that will raise the consciousness of All That Is at the same time it’s raising our own. And that is really exciting. (Laughter) It’s one thing to vote. It’s another to change the future of the world.

R: Both of which happen on different levels. To me that’s what the movie is so hopeful about. I know that all of us who see the world different from the way our government sees it, from time to time get hopeless, discouraged, overwhelmed and angry about what’s going on. And yet, if we know that there are different levels going on simultaneously and I practice my mastery skills and widen my neuro-net, then I can take actions that are aligned with my values and vote accordingly!

J: If we stay peaceful enough not to get bogged down in anger at someone who disagrees with our viewpoint.

R: Well yes, that is the hook of human nature and where each of works from day to day. It doesn’t matter whether we’re having a conversation in a grocery line, or at a town gathering or watching some commentary on television. As soon as we’re hooked, as soon as that addictive pattern starts running again, we’re off and running. Here comes the drama again. And the mastery is not so much to beat ourselves up or to say, "Oh well, I’ve failed." The mastery is to choose in that moment, "Ah, I want to disconnect from this. I want to find my true self."

J: That’s right. And to me, meditation is a really big part of that. You can be the scientist of your life and you can do it the hard way, through analysis, or the easy way, by meditating and literally changing your biochemistry to a more peaceful nature, allowing the hypothalamus of your brain to calm your stress hormones so that your fight, flight or freeze response is not so keen. You have a few seconds or even a nanosecond to reflect before attacking or counterattacking.

This helps me enormously and is the balancer which consistently sends me back to the meditation room, besides my love for the divine and the very real physical healing in the flowing currents of light. I see that I am a much more peaceful and integrated being, and that my perspective is tremendously expanded. Well, that’s the Maharishi Effect. It makes all the difference in the world for me.

R: Yes. And the effect of loving. That’s the other big benefit in my life, a goodness consciousness, as we’ve identified it. It’s always giving to us and sending us that vibration, that energy. We can call it loving, peace, grace, many other words. If I am not in a state to receive it, then I don’t know it’s there. It’s just like the shaman who’s standing on the shore and finally sees the ships. He couldn’t see them and then he could see them and pointed them out to his villagers.

It’s the same thing. Unless we’re in the receptive state that meditation puts us in, we can’t receive that energy. We don’t know it’s there. We don’t open to it or experience it. So when we talk about loving or the love of God, or self-loving or opening your heart, people don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s a nice idea, but until we get into that meditative state, we don’t know what that is.

There are other things that bring it in. Meditation isn’t the only thing, though it’s one of the main things. I think that really traumatic experiences can bring it in. How many stories have you read or heard about people in the middle of a car accident who see their lives flash before them, and they experience this incredible rush of love or peace. They sense the presence of this energy. I think a lot of times, something happens inside us and we step outside of ourselves, and all of a sudden it’s there. This benevolence, peace, grace and love.

J: So what we’re saying, I think, is that the two go hand in hand. You achieve the peaceful state and then become a scientist of your life, discovering and creating with the power of intentionality. What we’re really talking about is a balanced left and right brain, isn’t it? The scientists of life would be more the left brain, with the meditative, peaceful approach the right brain. So we’re really talking about uniting the two, as conscious co-creators of our lives.

R: I think so, and also, I think we’re talking about opening the center of the brain, which is classically the pituitary gland, opening up that chakra, that doorway, to receive the intelligence that is beyond the brain and is held in the auric field, in the noetic field, that is around our body and within our body and holds that intelligence that is beyond the brain.

I want to go back to the statement you made about the Creator and the two brains co-creating. Of course you know that my whole thing is about co-creation. I just loved the film because right at the end it started talking about co-creation in heaven on earth and this intentionality reality that we’ve been talking about. The chiropractor who talked about the neuro-net also said, "The way that I create my day every day is to ask that I affect the quantum field and I ask the..benevolent consciousness, or whatever he called it...to show me a sign today that it’s paying attention."

J: I think our sign today is this movie, don’t you?

R: Yes. That’s the meaning of co-creation. We are affecting the quantum field with our intention, with our love, and what we want back is that benevolent consciousness to show us a sign. In other words, to let us know that we are co-creating here. The words I put on that are, “Looking for the blessings." But I loved the way he put that. That’s what co-creation is, when we really begin to get that we can invite and invoke this consciousness to work with us daily, from minute to minute. That’s very exciting to know that, live it, do it. That’s heaven on earth.

J: Yes, in perfect unity, and I think that’s what we’re all seeking to move toward. To move out of that stage of to-me, by-me and through-me into as-me. If we’re consciously working with this, we become not only the instrument, but the actual blessing of that benevolent light on earth.

R: Because we carry it.

J: We carry it. We are it.

R: So we bless all because we know it. And that, to me, is what the light in this film is, that we all have the potential of becoming like any of the enlightened ones that we have studied and revered. I don’t care what religion you want to look at. All of them (the masters) became that. They became the blessing, the radiance of it, and that’s what each of us has the potential to become.

J: Yes. Consciously, through the work. We have to deal with our addictions, intolerance and short tempers, and as you say, not dally so comfortably with outer trinkets. We have to stand back and watch self go by.

R: Yes. What the movie is talking about is, to me, what I really love to talk about, and that’s the level of mastership to which we must aspire if we’re going to save this planet.

J: For me, the ultimate value of the movie is not only putting together a microscopic and macroscopic template by which we can look at and transform our negative emotions into a path of light, but also, a simple yet incredibly important achievement: to get people asking these kinds of questions. The more they do, the better off we will all be.

R: Absolutely. I have several clients who told me of going to the movie with their spouses or significant others and coming away from it profoundly affected. All of a sudden they were looking at their behaviors or patterns of irritability or addictions and wanting to change them. To me, that is the most wonderful gift of the moviethat we just open up to that next step. As long as we’re opening up to that next step, to receive from the “field” that next step, the doors will continue to open.

The revelation will not stop, if we just give it some attention and say, "Okay, here it comes."

"The body will again become restless
Until your soul paints all its beauty
Upon the sky."

Hafiz

The Still, Small Voice

The
mission of this newsletter is to bring you the inner peace
needed to access the voice of your soul. With this guidance
we are lifted into our highest and best, and the Earth becomes
a more humane and enlightened place.

Judith
Pennington, editor

Letters
to the Editor

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Phoenix, Arizona

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so right on target."

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